Time to do a follow-up on the money spent in the recent campaign for Platte County assessor. That’s the race in which Dagmar Wood, current first district commissioner, gave up her commission spot to run for assessor, where she was challenged by Marcus Farr, a current appraiser in the assessor’s office. Despite the name recognition advantage and major advantage in campaign war chest, Wood lost. Farr defeated her by a 72 votes, 4735 to 4663.
As we reported earlier, Wood had just short of $100,000 in her campaign account, a crazy amount for a county-level race. Her exact total was $98,692. Developers were bumping into one another to make donations to Wood’s campaign, and I’m sure they weren’t hoping for a future friendly assessment of properties, right? The question remaining from our last venture on this topic was: Did Wood spend the entire $98,000? The answer is in, now that 30-day after election reports have been filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission. The answer? Wood did not spend it all, she spent a total of $66,692. Why did she not go for broke? Likely because after spending $66,000 she was confident of victory and was holding $30,000 back for what she assumed would be a reelection campaign for assessor in four years. Welp. Voters had different ideas. In the last two elections, voters have shown they just don’t like Dagmar as much as Dagmar likes Dagmar. She may be getting the hint, as her 30-day after election report was filed as a “committee termination statement,” which could be a sign she is done with county office campaigning. Interestingly, one of the final expenses listed in Wood’s reporting was $952.05 for that now infamous Election Night Watch Party at Char Bar, where Fox 4 was invited, expecting to show up to interview county officials about what commissioners thought would be a victorious jail tax result. Oops.
Farr, meanwhile, had raised $22,802 for his campaign. Do you know how much he spent? He spent $22,279. Nearly all of it, and based on the closeness of the result, it’s a good thing he did.
Fascinating stuff. We’ll look at some of the final money totals in other races, such as the jail tax and second district county commissioner races in future columns. Stay tuned.
Barring a collapse in the final 10 games of the season, Kansas City will have a playoff baseball team for the first time since the World Series championship team of 2015. The Royals are in line for a wild card berth in this year’s post-season. And no, I’m not trying to jinx them by talking about this.To some of us nerds, there are few things more exciting than cool, crisp, invigorating fall days and MLB playoff baseball. October ranks up there with March as my favorite time on the sports calendar. When you factor in the weather, October is the best month. You can disagree with my opinion but of course you’d be wrong.
As we mentioned a couple weeks ago, the downside that as the second or third wild card qualifier the Royals will not get a home game in the opening best two out of three set of playoff games. They’ll have to win that first round series on the road in order to get some home games at The K.
As I write this, the Royals are 2.5 games behind Baltimore for the top wild card spot. The top wild card winner gets home games in the first round. That’s still a possibility, though I certainly would not consider it likely.
Anyway, just get into the postseason, boys, and we can worry about securing home games later.
We’ll get more specific on this in a future edition when we talk about polling on the Amendment questions facing us in November, but early polling shows voter reaction to the question of legalizing sports betting in Missouri is positive. Voters will decide that question at the ballot box Nov. 5 as Missouri tries to catch up to 38 other states–including Kansas–that already allow it.
While on that topic, I want to pass along a little NFL sports betting info that arrived in my email box a couple of weeks ago. It ranks which teams have been the most profitable to bet on over the past two seasons. Any guesses? No, it’s not the Kansas City Chiefs. Here are the top 10 in the rankings of most profitable to bet on since 2022:
- Steelers. 2. Bengals. 3. Lions. 4. 49ers. 5. Seahawks. 6. Jaguars. 7. Ravens. 8. Cowboys. 9. Giants. 10. Chiefs.
Research by gaming experts at Gamdom analyzed the moneyline odds (moneyline refers to odds on the straight-up outcome of a game with no consideration to a point spread) for every NFL team for every game week in a regular season over the past two season (total 34 games per team). They then calculated how much money would have been won (or lost) each week based on a $100 bet on each team.
Under those parameters, you would have profited $878 betting $100 on every Steelers game straight up the past two seasons. That’s considerably better than the next best, Bengals, whose profit total would have been $565.
Doing so on the Chiefs would have profited $144 for you.
What about teams at the other end of the spectrum? Thank you for asking. I was wondering the same thing. The worst team to place a $100 money line wager on since 2022 is the Saints. You would have suffered a loss of $1,052 by blindly betting them. The Panthers ($991) and the Chargers ($955) would have also lost a lot of money for you.
It has been a while since I’ve provided a Netflix recommendation. I have a winner for you. Check out the series called The Night Agent. It’s worth your time, if you’re into suspense and whatnot. It has 10 episodes lasting from 45-55 minutes each.
Quick synopsis for you: it’s an action-thriller series about an FBI agent who discovers a deadly conspiracy while monitoring an emergency phone line in the White House basement. Check it out and let me know if you enjoy it as much as I did.
Hey, Tom Brady showed improvement in his second week of being the analyst on Fox’s number one NFL broadcast team. More comfortable. And did you notice his voice sounded deeper this week than it did in his first game? The tone was deeper, not like a teenager working the drive through. I doubted myself on this until I read a professional who works in the broadcasting industry point out that producers had done “microphone processing” for Brady. I felt the need to Google the phrase “microphone processing” and learned it “can refer to a variety of techniques and devices that can enhance the sound of a microphone, including audio compressors that can adjust the volume of a voice to make it louder while still capturing all the details.”
So there you go. Technology made Brady’s voice sound fuller than it did on the broadcast a week earlier. The more you know.
(Until fall weather arrives, help keep Foley invigorated by emailing ivan@plattecountylandmark.com)
